http://theworkingdraft.com/media/podcasts2/BaxterBuildingEp41.mp3 Previously on Baxter Building: Forget about your previouslys, because this episode we’re jumping through the years to cover four different annuals we’ve left untouched until now, from 1985 through 1991. What is time, anyway…?…

7:47-47:49: Comics worth discussing (brought to you by Hoopla, and yes, the hyperlinks for the DC books are to the Hoopla pages): Wired: Graeme is reading Batman And The Outsiders, Vol. 2 by Mike W. Barr and Jim Aparo (and Trevor Von Eeden!) Tired: Jeff read Superman Vs. Darkseid by John Byrne, Mark Schultz, Jerry Ordway, Michael Turner, Jeph Loeb and many others. Enmired: John Byrne, what the hell is wrong with you?

47:49-1:09:54:Wild: Jeff wants to talk about Dark Knights Rising: The Wild Hunt #1 by Grant Morrison, Scott Snyder, James Tynion IV, Joshua Williamson, Howard Porter, Jorge Jimenez, Doug Mahnke and Jamie Mendoza (full spoilers on this one, I guess?) Mild: how Geoff Johns sees the DCU, as reflected in current issues of Doomsday Clock and perhaps the event’s conclusion Unfiled: discussions of the DC Rebirth Special, Earth2 by Morrison and Quitely and much more.

1:09:54-1:28:48: Jeff really thought we were going to get into a very deep, spoiler-filled discussion of the Black Panther movie, but instead…we just kind of lightly discuss it, spoil a chunk of it, but only after discussing Black Panther Annual #1 [Kindle/Comixology link: http://amzn.to/2CIpaL3 ] by Christopher Priest, Don McGregor, Reginald Hudlin, Mike Perkins, Daniel Acuña, and Ken Lashley.

1:28:48-2:24:09: I think we end our discussion of the movie here and move on to talk about some BP-related marketing from Marvel, including their pricing of the first three digital volumes of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ run for $1.99, as well as some other Marvel tricks about which Jeff is his unsurprisingly hand-wringy self. Also discussed: the class action suit against Funko; the Marvel presentation at ComicsPro; C.B. Cebulski; Marvel Fresh Start; the artist exodus from Marvel; the free digital graphic novel giveaway with Amazon; idle speculation about the future of Marvel Unlimited; and much more.

2:24:09-end: Closing comments! Look for us on Stitcher!Itunes! Twitter together and separately: Graeme and Jeff! Matt! Tumblr, and on Patreon where a wonderful group of people make this all possible, including the kind crew at American Ninth Art Studios and Empress Audrey, Queen of the Galaxy, to whom we are especially grateful for their continuing support of this podcast.

0:00-50:13: Greetings! We are right into it because we have a lot to talk about! Because Dan Coyle demanded it, we are going to talk about the entire run of Star Brand from the 1980s. But first! Jeff has to talk about The Defenders. the eight episode miniseries on Netflix that is the culmination of Marvel and Netflix’s strategy for the last three years. Full spoilers as Jeff vents, decries, and bemoans the experience. SPOILERS for the full series as we discuss not only it, but the two seasons of Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, a little bit of Iron Fist, the Inhumans IMAX flick, and even the Punisher trailer (see above).

50:13-1:03:11: Also, on Netflix: an American adaptation of genuine manga classic Death Note directed by Adam Wingard! While less worthy of Jeff’s ire, it has some very interesting adaptation choices he cannot stop fixating on, and so I guess it seemed like a really good idea to share with you here? (It beats livetweeting, I guess?) (Lakeith Stanfield, tho!)

1:03:11-2:09:31: But then finally…there was nothing else for us to do but finally discuss Star Brand, Jim Shooter’s flagship title for his burgeoning New Universe line back in 1986. Fortunately[?] for us, all of Shooter’s issues, as well as the follow-up stories by various writers until John Byrne steps in to steer the book from issue #11 until its end, are collected in two trades by Marvel, and we are here to talk about *all* of it. Discussed: Jim Shooter and his remarkable take on morality and sex, the difference between supporting characters who seem based on real people and people who don’t, Bobbie Chase’s amazing annual, the “rules” of the New Universe, The Greatest American Hero, South Park, The Pitt, and much, much more.

2:09:31-2:33:10: So much more, in fact, that Graeme has supplemental material about the New Universe, including an overview of Spitfire and the Troubleshooters, a fun fact about Strikeforce: Morituri, the Quasar epilogue issue, and of course…much, much more. And then…

2:33:10-end: Closing comments! Look for us on Stitcher!Itunes! Twitter together and separately: Graeme and Jeff! Matt! Tumblr, and on Patreon where a wonderful group of people make this all possible, including the kind crew at American Ninth Art Studios and Empress Audrey, Queen of the Galaxy, to whom we are especially grateful for their continuing support of this podcast.

Next week: Wait, What? Ep. 232! Look for it on Labor Day U.S.A., Monday!

http://theworkingdraft.com/media/podcasts2/BaxterBuildingEp32.mp3 Previously on Baxter Building: Sue Richards no more! No, wait; I mean Invisible Girl no more, because after facing off against Psycho-Man and the Hate Monger, Sue has become the Invisible Woman because she…

0:00-18:02: Greetings from Graeme McMillan and Jeff Lester! It’s only a few seconds in when Graeme says, “Welcome to the Mellow Wait, What? Hour,” and although he’s only riffing on Jeff’s low-key opening…he’s kind of on the money! (Although, y’know, not an hour, of course.) Yes, *un*-strap your seatbelts as two semi-overworked dudes let down what’s left of their hair to talk comics with a certain je ne sais atténué. We move quickly on to talk about the world of comics news, but there is a certain indolence there as well because, as Graeme puts it, “a lot of people are, to be honest, shitting themselves before San Diego.” Discussed: supporting examples; the few announcements that have popped up, the lack of even embargoed news for Graeme to have up his sleeve; Previews Night; a thought experiment about what might have happened if DC had tried to do a prequel to Watchmen; and what happened to bookstore sales of Wonder Woman after being the biggest movie of the summer; and more.

18:02-29:27: By the way, if you’re Dan Coyle—and hopefully that is only applicable to one person and there’s not a small army of people using that monicker to snark at us in our website’s comments—our discussion of a conspiracy theory about Marvel’s role in keeping Wonder Woman from making any of the sales charts on Amazon leads to us both explicitly agreeing: Yes! Yes, we will talk about John Byrne’s run on Star Brand! And then us being us, we go on to talk a bit about our memories of John Byrne’s Star Brand, the end of the New Universe (and Graeme being Graeme, he admits to having already just read what he’s just agreed to read), a sly serving of three way mid-80s beef, and more. But first! We talk a bit about digital buffet fatigue, the reduction of prices in the 2000AD online store (which Jeff can’t even think about too much or he will lose his mind and most of his most recent paycheck), and other sundries. If you haven’t gotten the sense this is an even more meandering episode than usual, dear Whatnaut, hopefully the fact I just talked about stuff I remember us discussing before it even actually got mentioned in the logical order you would expect it in should give you a clue.

29:27-41:57: And here’s another clue: “Oh man, Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe,” Graeme sighs,” what did you do to me?” If you think that means we are going to tread on the edges of sacred House to Astonish ground and discuss both the Handbook and Who’s Who in the DCU, give yourself a cigar! A thirty-plus year old cigar! One inked by Josef Rubenstein! And then was pressed in a Tuska-era issue of Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes! (Don’t worry, it will all make sense if you listen.)

41:57-58:12: “Ah, Graeme, do you want to talk about recent comics that you’ve read?” Graeme admits (not entirely accurately, as it will turn out) the only recent comics he’s read is Dark Days: The Casting by Scott Snyder, James Tynion IV, Jim Lee, Andy Kubert, John Romita, Jr., Scott Williams, Klaus Janson, and Danny Miki (with Alex Sinclair and Jeremiah Skipper on colors)! But should you be surprised when talk turns to which Super Powers action figures and which Secret Wars action figures each of us had? Probably not, no.

58:12-1:01:21: Want to hear Graeme recap the amazing “City of the Damned” storyline from Judge Dredd The Complete Case Files, Vol. 8? If not, skip the section but hoo boy you will be missing out. I *really* want to read this storyline now!

1:01:21-1:06:57: And then we’re back to talking about Dark Days: The Casting again!

1:06:57-2:01:02: And then Jeff wants to blab about the other recent comics he’s read because he thinks—possibly quite mistakenly—that would be something the listeners to this podcast might want to hear about: Discussed: Rocket #3 by Al Ewing and Adam Gorham; Suicide Squad #21 by Rob Williams and Gus Vasquez; Deathstroke #21 by Christopher Priest, Diogenes Neves, and Jason Paz; Batman #25 and #26 by Tom King and Mikel Janin; Chilling Adventures of Sabrina #7 by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and Robert Hack, which leads to a very long discussion/disagreement between Graeme and Jeff about who would be on a list of the best-selling/most reliable creators of the current generation of Image creators, with a lot of Graeme looking up sales figures and dates; Kill or Be Killed #10 by Brubaker and Phillips (and Elizabeth Breitweiser!); Rock Candy Mountain #4 (so good!) by Kyle Starks and part of an ongoing underlying conversation across these titles—why aren’t more good comics discussed as they go along? Are we *all* addicted to dissecting the next new thing?

2:08:11-2:22:15: Closing comments? No, not quite! Jeff wanted to correct an earlier misstatement of his from a few weeks back when he said that all episodes of Wait, What? are currently available on iTunes. Turns out iTunes’ podcast lists top out at 300 so…happy tricentennial to us? And also, though we tried to avoid doing our quickly-becoming-a-standard-shtick of complaing about Marvel: you guys did you see that damn t-shirt variant cover thing? What the hell?!

2:22:15-end: “I have, I’ve got to admit, really enjoyed this meandering episode,” announces Graeme. “Because it really is so close to San Diego that this is exactly where my mind is at right now.” And with that—after some debate as to when we will return (spoilers: three weeks!), we move to..closing comments! Look for us on Stitcher!Itunes! Twitter together and separately: Graeme and Jeff! Matt! Tumblr, and on Patreon where a wonderful group of people make this all possible, including the kind crew at American Ninth Art Studios and Empress Audrey, Queen of the Galaxy, to whom we are especially grateful for their continuing support of this podcast.

In Three Weeks: Wait, What?, Ep. 230 (or three hundred and something, but who’s counting?) Have a nice little summer break and come back and join us here in August!

http://theworkingdraft.com/media/podcasts2/BaxterBuildingEp31.mp3 Previously on Baxter Building: The Thing is gone! She-Hulk is here to stay, despite topless sunbathing on the Baxter Building roof! And the series has brought on Jerry Ordway to ink John Byrne’s pencils,…

0:00-4:10: Greetings from Graeme “Nathan Detroit” McMillan and Jeff “Nicely-Nicely Johnson” Lester! Yes, you know you’re in for a weird one when the very first topic right out of the gate is Guys & Dolls, and who’s seen it and who hasn’t? But that’s only as an opening to Graeme’s desire to become a chicken farmer? We use our title catch phrase a little too often around these parts, but….huh?

4:10-12:20: From farming and growing chicken to comics and…Howard Chaykin? Yes. Graeme did that. And so we talk about the cover controversy to Divided States of Hysteria #4. And we move from that to talk about the XXX covers from Image, the upcoming “hardcore” cover to Savage Dragon #225 posted in censored version by Erik Larsen, about which Graeme so rightly says, “[Larsen] doing it at the same time as the Chaykin thing is amazing. Like, Image would not respond to comment, but the Image founder is like “You guys! Savage Dragon’s got his dick out!”

12:20-46:45: To which Jeff ruefully replies, “Oh man, it’s going to be our dick out episode. This is…really depressing.” (For a good laugh, play Graeme’s “is it?” at 12:25 and chortle at his obvious terror. Maybe it’s just me, but it gets progressively funnier the more you listen to it.) But this is because Jeff just read more or less side-by-side volume one of Stjepan Šejić’s Sunstone, and the first fifty pages of Volume 2 of The Complete Crepax…and so has two erotic comics with a similar lifestyle (BDSM) at their core but two very different ways of looking at same. Also discussed: Adam Warren’s very excellent Empowered,Menage a 3 and the brilliant cartooning of Gisele Lagace (with a very on-topic digression from Graeme about her excellent work on Archie Meets The Ramones); the *very explicit* Alfie by InCase, the classic Oh Joy Sex Toy by Erika Moen, and more.

1:01:05-1:03:13: There’s a very ridiculous form of the patented Wait, What? Techpocalypse as Jeff accidentally tugs his headset out of the USB port with his big, ridiculous feet. This leads to figure out how many times we’ve had the dreaded “we were talking but Skype was not recording” nightmarish situation that has happened once or twice (three times, we think!). Fortunately, it did not happen this time!

1:42:36-2:24:36: Chip Zdarsky and Adam Kubert’s Peter Parker: The Spectacular Spider-Man #1! We said we’d talk about it. But first! Jeff was supposed to read all of John Byrne’s run on Alpha Flight. He only made it through the first ten. Listen to him complain about it here. And *then* we talk about Peter Parker: The Spectacular Spider-Man #1. Discussed: that first issue and the Goran Parlov back-up, change and the illusion of change, Marvel and DC and the cyclical nature of reboots and why that might be easier for DC to pull off than Marvel, and then….more complaining about John Byrne’s Alpha Flight! Oh, sweet, sweet complaining! And then one of us finally thinks to check the time and it’s….

2:24:36-end: Closing comments! Look for us on Stitcher!Itunes! Twitter together and separately: Graeme and Jeff! Matt! Tumblr, and on Patreon where a wonderful group of people make this all possible, including the kind crew at American Ninth Art Studios and Empress Audrey, Queen of the Galaxy, to whom we are especially grateful for their continuing support of this podcast.

Next week: Baxter Building Ep. 31! Covering Fantastic Four issues #278-284 by John Byrne. It’s just next week!

http://theworkingdraft.com/media/podcasts2/BaxterBuildingEp30.mp3 Previously on Baxter Building: Technically, last time we covered a few years’ worth of annuals, but in terms of the monthly comic book, John Byrne has settled into a comfortable rut of retro attitude…

http://theworkingdraft.com/media/podcasts2/BaxterBuildingEp28.mp3 Previously on Baxter Building: The bloom has fallen off the rose for the John Byrne era of Fantastic Four, it has to be said. After an initial run of issues that got Jeff and…

http://theworkingdraft.com/media/podcasts2/RealBaxterBuildingEp27.mp3 Previously on Baxter Building: After an impressive debut, the John Byrne era of Fantastic Four stumbled as the writer/artist completed his first year — but he certainly continued to be ambitious, bringing in some…